Iraqi and Syrian Judicial and Intelligence Documents on Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani)

In addition to the purported testimony of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani about Syria’s current president and former al-Qaeda branch leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani), a pro-Iranian and ‘resistance axis’ Telegram channel based in Iraq, called Sabereen News, recently leaked a set of Iraqi and Syrian documents regarding al-Sharaa in an attempt to discredit him as a ‘terrorist’ with whom the Iraqi government should not engage.

In my view, such antagonism is completely counter-productive from the perspective of Iraqi interests: the Iraqi government needs a cross-border partner to combat the low-level Islamic State insurgency, and the fact is that al-Sharaa’s group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has a reliable track record in cracking down on the Islamic State. Further, it is clear that al-Sharaa has no intention of allowing Syria to be a staging ground for attacks on Iraq, and bolstering of ties between the two countries would be good for promoting cross-border trade and reviving Iraqi tourism to sites such as the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Damascus, which has seen few Iraqi pilgrims since the fall of the Assad regime.

In any case, the documents leaked by Sabereen News are interesting and generally align with the recently published testimony attributed to al-Adnani regarding al-Sharaa/Jowlani. The most important insights include: